There’s Nothing New About the Effort to Propagandize the Military
American-born William Joyce, AKA Lord Haw-Haw, Nazi radio propagandist
Article by Clarice Feldman in The American Thinker
There’s Nothing New About the Effort to Propagandize the Military
More years ago than I care to remember, I was a college intern working on Capitol Hill. As part of our experience, various members of Congress came to speak to us. One of them as I recall was Strom Thurmond, at that time the Democratic senator from South Carolina, and a strong segregationist. He was pushing his plan to propagandize the military in something he called “Americanism.” Most of the interns in my class were well-socialized kids from northeast colleges like Yale and Mount Holyoke and such and they listened politely without objection. I wasn’t. I said I could understand how you could propagandize Soviet troops in Marxism, but except for basic civics lessons, there was such a broad range of views on what were the appropriate policies to follow, it seemed to me that what he was really promoting was a plan to convert the military to his own political views. He was angered by the dissent and said he thought there probably were far left people in that very room, glaring at me when he said it. In any event his plan failed. (The next near brush I had with him was when we moved into a cooperative apartment building where both he and Hubert Humphrey were also owners. The first day we moved in I was taken aside by the older women residents. ”Never get into an elevator with Strom, they warned.”)
At the moment, under claims of diversity and using the preposterous Critical Race Theory, this administration is trying to propagandize the military, and it is clear the plan is to demonize Donald J. Trump, Republicans, and white people. And while it looks momentarily like they are succeeding in this plan, there is every evidence that Americans will not put up with this much longer. There’s good reason not to. It’s impossible to imagine anything more likely to destroy the cohesion military operations need to succeed. Nor can I see how any program can do more to destroy the morale of the troops than this does.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III is at the top of the pyramid and a look at his policies is enough to see that he is misguided and presents a real danger to national security. The point of a military is to defend the country, and it boggles the mind to conceive of any way such divisive pap as Critical Race Theory can encourage men and women to risk their lives to defend a country which your commanders portray to you as a racist hellhole. David Horowitz at Frontpage magazine has published a thorough article on Austin, his views, and his appointees working to carry out such a repulsive plot.
Secretary Austin’s appointment of Bishop Garrison to head the newly created Countering Extremism Working Group is a major giveaway. As Horowitz reports:
In July 2019, for example, Garrison said in a tweet: “Support for him [Trump], a racist, is support for ALL his beliefs. He’s dragging a lot of bad actors (misogynist, extremists, other racists) out into the light, normalizing their actions. If you support the President, you support that.” “There is no room for nuance with this,” Garrison added. “There is no more ‘but I’m not like that’ talk.” This is the man in charge of purifying our military.
Austin's decision to appoint Garrison to head the CEWG is even more significant in light of the fact that Garrison is a vocal supporter of the 1619 Project. Garrison put forth a passionate defense of the 1619 Project in an August 2019 essay in which he wrote that America's “hatred of communities of color and other vulnerable groups” is “deeply rooted in slavery, the treatment of African slaves, and the continued struggle of the black American community for equal treatment.” No acknowledgement, of course, of the tremendous contributions to racial equality for blacks in the founders’ declaration of equality for all, the ultimate sacrifices made by President Lincoln and 350,000 Union soldiers to free the slaves, or the white majorities in Congress who passed the Civil Rights Acts. Instead: “Now, arguably more than at any time in recent history, we need to recognize that extremism, racist policies, and white supremacy stand as existential threats not only to American life but to the future of our country and others around the globe,” added Garrison. No evidence needed of racist policies of white supremacy or the “existential threats” they are alleged to pose to America and the globe.
Austin has already purged hundreds of Trump appointees from Pentagon advisory boards and panels. He believes, says Horowitz, that racism is America’s most “salient and enduring feature.” His emphasis on purging extremists from the military merits consideration of what he considers “extremist,” and a close look indicates “the scary catch-all term “extremist” refers not to Islamic fundamentalists or Antifa anarchists or pro-Chinese infiltrators (none of whom the current administration regards as a national security problem) but to the 75+ million supporters of former President Trump, Republicans, and anyone who resists the anti-white racism currently rampant in our political discourse.”
When Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, commander of a critical squadron of the U.S. Space Force, warned that Marxism and critical race theory (which after all is simply Marxism that replaces class with race as the boogeyman) was gaining a foothold in the military and “would erode the trust and confidence these young people have in their country and in the Constitution,’ he was removed from that post.
Two members of Congress have pushed back: Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Congressman Jim Banks (R-IN). Cotton reported to Austin that he’d received several hundred whistleblower complaints concerning the propagandizing about systematic racism and fake history, reports about “plummeting morale, growing mistrust between the races and the sexes … and unexpected separations and retirements based on these training alone.” Austin tried to sidestep that with pablum about diversity and Cotton wasn’t buying it. ”This is not about diversity in general, though. This is about a very specific kind of anti-American indoctrination that it sweeping into some parts of our military…”
In like manner, Jim Banks tore into Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday for recommending to every sailor a book by Ibram X. Kendi (previously known as Henry Rogers) on Critical Race Theory in which he contends you can either be a racist or an anti-racist and to be an anti-racist you have to follow his directives.
I don’t want to get on too much of a bandwagon about this, but when Gilday insists that making it the policy of the US Navy to allow officers, petty officers, and sailors to be degraded and humiliated based on race will create a stronger and more cohesive force, he is either mentally deranged (I’m open to that excuse), trying to gaslight Congress and the American people and the Navy, or indulging in recreational pharmacology. Or any combination thereof. You can’t expect sailors who’ve been forced to sit through the bullsh** Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity classes (they aren’t called DIE for nothing) to work together cooperatively or to socialize off duty or to even care about the service that is telling them that their worth is limited to their skin color and sexual preferences and preferred pronouns.
l’l leave the last words on this to be the salty Kurt Schlichter.
Everyone hates CRT, critical race theory, that bizarre, ridiculous, and morally illiterate hodge-podge of Marxist mumbo-jumbo blended with a healthy dose of the kind of racial hash that would make Democrat David Duke beam. Even the lib wine moms, who were so ecstatic about the recent lack of mean tweeting -- ironic that the only man able to give them pleasure was Donald Trump, and he does it by not doing anything -- despise this Marxist pestilence. The guys in the campaign business I talk to are giddy and often burst into spontaneous jigs of pure glee at the poll numbers they are seeing. Hey Congress, congratulations! Thanks to CRT, there’s something America hates even more than you! [snip] We conservatives should actually be glad about the left’s CRT fetish. After all, these dummies have handed us a giant Louisville Slugger to use to pummel them. The best part is that they are surprised we’re upset. Maybe they should get out more. Maybe they should meet some normal people. And it’s not just normal people of pallor who are on their last nerve. It’s all sorts of normal people - black, white, yellow, brown, whatever, united in their refusal to hate their neighbors in order to provide a short-term political edge to a pack of elite fools and scammers. It’s not merely that normal people understand that Balkanization leads to the Balkans, and that the Balkans are not a role model (I was there – trust me, you do not want a society where ethnicity is everything). It’s that normal people know that this is evil, that to judge one by the color of his skin instead of the content of his character is un-American and un-Judeo-Christian, and probably un-every other religion except Marxism.
I’d be ashamed that some in our society were drawn toward the siren song of bigotry if I wasn’t so proud of my countrymen for so overwhelmingly rejecting hate in favor of truth, liberty, and Americanism.
Schlichter and I are not the only ones sensing a strong pushback against this obviously hateful drive to divide us. Over at the NY Post, Glenn Reynolds details the tide turning against the woke idiocy including CRT and defunding the police.
Parents are joining together to fight it in schools and even late-night comics are decrying it. Let’s hope that it is as disastrous to the Democrats 2022 dreams as I think it will be
Post a Comment